1240 Complexities.

I have to say, you guys were certainly in a sharing mood this weekend. XD I’m glad to know I have a readers with a range of experiences. I couldn’t help but notice some commonalities too, of course.

I wonder what we should talk about now… If I wasn’t thinking about it I’d totally be able to come up with something I want to know. How about this? Ever had a supernatural experience? Tell me about that? I’m thinking of it because of a thing in Animal Crossing.

So, for those of you who don’t play, in Animal Crossing: New Leaf you can “dream” of other towns you wouldn’t be able to visit normally. As far as I know it’s totally pointless other than to see what people are doing with their design ideas, but it is cool to see what other people are up to, especially if you don’t get to visit a lot of towns.

Anyway there’s a village in Japan called Aika. It’s set up really weird and tells some sort of creepy story as you move from house to house. It’s basically set up like a spiral, and the whole town is built so as to make you pass through it in a specific way. Honestly I can’t do the thing justice with a blog post, but I know of a youtube channel that has a two part walkthrough of the town. It’s not comprehensive though. Going there is better. Click here to check out the Creepy Gaming video. Try to ignore the opening “skit”…

The whole thing is pretty brilliant as far as a horror themed village goes. Strangely enough, if you ask Porter about the visitor count he says 90 people have visited. It seems strange to me that the number would be so low for such a well known destination. Maybe the counter resets after a certain number? I dunno. In any event, as hard as it tries to be creepy it’s still taking place in the Animal Crossing world and that severely undercuts the menace. Even more so for me because my town happens to share a resident with Aika. What this means is that one character knew me and was really happy that I was in her dream. XD She’ll probably mention it when I see her next time.

For as long as I’ve been reading this comic, I have to say I’m very impressed with your ability to keep a proper cohesion to the order of events within the story. It makes perfect sense for Ed to be clueless to Carol’s satisfaction of the status quo, considering all she’s done to keep it as such…

I think they mean that Carol didn’t really go around telling everyone she liked the status quo. She worked at it behind the scenes, unlike Thomas. So to them it makes sense that being newer to the family, Ed wouldn’t have sensed that.

Perception is a difficult thing to factor into whether or not you can determine if you’ve had a supernatural experience.

I’ve had the strangest dreams, both involving dead people, both involving what was essentially a simple conversation with them during which nothing of import was said on either side. Both people had committed suicide. I don’t know if that matters or not.

There was a pervading feeling of sadness during the first dream and this weird sense that the person wanted to say more to me then what they actually said. The second time it happened I felt nothing until after I woke up.

I’ve never dreamt of either of them again after the first time. The experiences were profoundly different from any other dream I’ve ever had, but I don’t know if that qualifies.

I suppose I’ve never seen or experienced the supernatural, but I understand that my perception is limited and the possibilities are limitless, so I believe in it quite firmly.

Sorry I haven’t commented in a while. Still reading though. I continue to enjoy your comic a lot. Catch you later man.

I actually don’t really like visiting dream towns. I mean, it’d be cool if more of them told a story like Aika, but visiting just for the sake of visiting is kinda pointless. You can’t DO anything, you can’t TAKE anything, you can’t BUY anything or clean up for them or actually interact with a real person! Plus, once you’ve torn through one huge patch of flowers to destroy them, the novelty wears off.

The apartment my then boyfriend and I lived in about six years ago was in an early 1900′s house, rope sash windows with wavy glass and all, in the Tremont area of Cleveland, Ohio. We had just moved in the weekend of Halloween, and he was off to his friend’s house in Pittsburgh for their annual party (for which I always have to work), and I was laying on our futon in the twilight while staring out the front door. All of a sudden I saw a shadow figure standing in the doorway, and found I could not move. Somehow this didn’t worry me, and I wasn’t scared or too afraid to move, but when I tried to get up to see what it was, I found I was literally frozen in place. The figure was tall and had a large western style hat on, and stood in the doorway looking at me for several seconds. The shadow figure had some mass, but I could still see through it. Then it was gone, I could move, and it never happened again.

When I was in middle school (6th-8th grade), I was walking home from school one very snowy afternoon, and while knee deep it a fluffy snowdrift while walking through a park, for about thirty seconds I found myself unable to move, and my vision turned completely red. All I could see was bright red. And it’s not like it was a sunny day and I was going snow blind. I tried to look around, but couldn’t move a thing, not even my neck. Then it was gone. I was at my dad’s that weekend (divorce is fun! not) and mentioned it to him and his wife when they asked if anything interesting happened that week, and the silence afterward was deafening (: They looked at each other, then at me, and said almost in unison that it sounded like an alien encounter.

I also tend to hear my name being called as I’m falling asleep, and sometimes in old houses I get bad feelings and refuse to go into certain rooms.

Well, I mentioned briefly in my big post last week that I picked my nose and ate my boogers. I’ve stopped now, but I had that habit for about 28 years. Nothing my parents or I did would work.

New Year’s, when I was 31 years old, our church started doing a fast. It is what is referred to as a 21 day Daniel fast. Well, I only knew of one kind of fast. I hadn’t read the instructions for the Daniel fast, so I didn’t start when they did.

I finally worked up the nerve, and started 9 days later, and managed to fast for 12 days. I ate nothing, and only drank water for those 12 days.

When it was over, and I could eat again, my bad habit was completely broken. It might be strange to hear someone talking about such a thing, but not having the shame over my head has really helped me open up about it.

A couple of surprising things I’ve found out is how many people never knew about my habit, and how many other people do the same thing.

Some people may or may not believe what I have described is supernatural, but it goes beyond just breaking a bad habit. My whole world has been opening up in front of me ever since.

That’s a very interesting story you got there! I guess you could say you broke your bad habit after forcing yourself on a test of character. It’s impressive what changes a challenge to one’s own limits can work.

This story aside, I gotta say I admire you, sir. I’ve just read your comment on the previous comic, dealing with your faith and so on. Why do I say I respect you? Well, I guess it takes some talking about me first to understand.

I’m the kind of person who is very interested in what he himself doesn’t feel or chooses to experience – since I can’t personally relate to these things, I want to understand them as well as I can through other who are willing to share with me. I’m also what I like to call a “nothing-ist” (this sounds better in my mother tongue) in relation to religiousness and such, as in the mystical aspects of life have no personal meaning for me. I have no religion and don’t believe in the supernatural. That’s not out of conviction, but because I simply never felt the existence of anything like that to be true to me, and would feel like a hypocrite to fake it, or to go out of my way to try to force an experience.
These two combined are the reasons I’m very interested ingetting to know people’s religious and “mystical” experiences, the way they feel and interpret this kind of thing, and how it affects their lives.

And the reason I respect you is because you’re very honest and straightfoward about your choice for sexual abstinence. You have something you want to discover with it, instead of simply going with the herd. I actually feel sad for those who justify their abstinence along the lines of “I do it because it’s expected of me/it’s God’s command”. They have the right to make a choice, sure, but aren’t giving up on the experience for what they themselves want, instead they do it to satisfy the expectatives others (whoever those may be) impose on them. You’re the first one I’ve ever seen to be this self-conscious about it, to want to actually improve from it. I really hope you find out it’s been worth the wait!

Thank you, @Yawnitz, you have documented a perfect case of behavior modification. Psychologists are always looking for cases where a person breaks (or is broken of) a bad habit. Well, in your case, twelve days of abstinence seems to have been at least part of the solution. Which is not to say that, perhaps, you were the recipient of divine intervention…

As far as supernatural stuff goes, I believe in ghosts… I have friends who don’t, but to me the explanation of “there are spirits” is more satisfying to explain things that have happened in my life than “well, I guess stuff nobody can explain just happens sometimes.” Either way, it’s still kind of nervewracking stuff to happen, especially since I was mostly a little kid when all of my eperiences happened. So, I won’t be upset if someday they do totally disprove ghosts eisting or whatever, because it was still freaky at the time XD

We live in an ancient wooden house, built in 1901 (in a town in Australia, just for clarity. There’s a house in our street that was apparently used as a rehab hospital for soldiers invalided home from World War 2, but I don’t think our hosue was anything important/noteworthy). And when I was really little, everything was pretty normal, until one day my brother decided he wanted to crawl into the sort-of-attic, since we could reach the hatch into the ceiling by standing on my wardrobe. As soon as we opened it, we both freaked out, for no particular reason other than it just all of a sudden felt really scary, and we were like 9 and 5 at the time so I guess we weren’t eactly logicians. But so we closed it again and never told my parents, and for about 5 years after that weird shit happened pretty often.

I, being 12 when the LotR films came out, had a bunch of posters of Legolas all over my walls, and in the middle of the night they would all fall down at the same time, roughly every two weeks, for that whole time (faulty sticky tape, possibly. Though the same stuff has kept the same posters on my walls since then for nearly ten years, so… actually I should really take those down some time haha), which would have freaked me out bad enough even if it was some explainable thing, but the weirdest thing for me is that there was one corner of the ceiling in my room covered with a glowing light every night, no matter how much I tried to see if it was coming through windows or whatever. Then, one day, we eventually mentioned to my parents (who both started off as pretty Christian and then suddenly both became really new-agey at some stage) about the freaky stuff and they were like “oh yeah, it does feel kinda strange, doesn’t it” and then did something new-agey (no seances or whatever, they might have burnt incense, I don’t really remember), and then after that even though nothing in my room had changed, the light was never there again.

Not very scary in the recount, I know, but as a little kid I was pretty terrified. Especially by the posters thing. Waking up to the sound of cascading posters in the dark in the middle of the night is a bit of a shock. There were other things like all my toys and ornaments being knocked over and my brother sleepwalking, but that was basically it at my house. The only other story I have is from my school.

I was the sound and lighting captain at my school, which basically just means I operated the microphones and auditorium stage lights for people, but I also had keys to the costume cage backstage and dance rooms, and had to spend a lot of time at school at night helping people rehearse things. The costume cage and stage areas were always creepy at night, just having a strange feeling of really wanting to get out of there (never when musicals/performances were on, though, weirdly), and one night my music teacher and I were locking up the roller door at the back of the costume cage from the outside… we’d just locked it and put all the little latches in place when there was a gigantic bang, as something slammed against the roller door from the inside (scared the crap out of both of us), and we unlocked it because we thought it might have been a stray cat stuck in there or something. But we looked, and turned all the lights on, and couldn’t find anything, and he made me promise never to tell any of the other students because they would get scared. He had a lot of stories about weird stuff happening at the school, because he would often be there at midnight composing or something… sometimes, randomly, at midnight, the school bells around the music building (which were old-fashioned ones, not like the rest of the school which were new electronic ones) would go off for a full minute, which was honestly probably some weird programming bug, but still a good story to tell kids to freak them out XD So he banned the older students from telling ghost stories to the younger kids.

Once a group of younger girls actually thought I was the ghost while I was setting up sonud equipment in the hall, but I’m pretty sure it’s not me.

Heh. This reminds me of the curse of Macbeth. Supposedly, if someone even mentions that play during a production, it’s enough to elicit disaster of all sorts. I have only heard a few stories. I mostly didn’t believe in them, other than it being fun to.

What this really reminds me of is my childhood. Naturally, as a child, I was afraid of the dark. We had to go through the hallway to get to the bathroom. The three of us (my two brothers and I) had to share it.

Anyway, I decided to have some friends help me overcome my fear of the dark one night. I don’t remember any names, specifically, but I would go through a ritual at night. I would look at something, see what it looked like, and give it a name based on what I thought it was. They were mostly silly names like Ricky the Ragdoll or Penny the pen cap.

At any rate, once I completed the ritual, and there were a few objects I could see from my bed that I had assigned as my guardian, I would go to sleep. EVERY SINGLE TIME I did this, it was as though the whole house came to life. When I got up to use the bathroom after that, things I did not assign as my guardians would come to life.

It occasionally freaked me out pretty bad. The first night I did this, as I got up, I walked to the door to my room, and the Pac-Man ghosts were orbiting there in my doorway. I just walked through them on my way to the bathroom. I looked behind me, and one of the through rugs in the house was crawling after me. Not menacingly, mind you. It was just following me. I went into my parent’s bedroom, and woke them up to tell them what was going on. Not really being awake, they just dismissed me and told me to go back to sleep. During this conversation, the rocking chair next to their bed blinked at me with eyes about the size of softballs.

One time, I decided to sleep in my older brother’s room. He got to have a room to himself. He was pretty much out of it, too, and agreed to let me sleep in his bed just so I would shut up. He had a chair in his room that had a karate gi on it. The back of the gi had a face, and that chair walked all around the room that night. It even moved the chalkboard my brother had in his room at the time, and tried to get behind it.

Naturally, all of this happened because the lights had to stay off since it was night time. A couple of times, I ended up staying awake for the rest of the night, and watched as the light from the rising sun caused all of the illusions to fade into the objects they actually were.

The pen cap was actually a shirt hanging up on the door knob to my closet. The dog head on the ground that barked at me as I jumped off of my bunk bed was actually just a ball cap left on the floor. The rocking chair was actually full of my parents’ clean laundry that hadn’t been folded up yet. I didn’t know that was my brother’s karate gi until the light came and revealed that wrinkles in the gi vaguely looked like a face to me.

These experiences were short-lived, though. The last time I started to do the ritual, I had begun to give my bed a name, and it was going to be a wolf. I was going to be sleeping in the wolf’s mouth. When I realized that, I decided to stop the ritual, and declared I didn’t need any protection from the dark anymore.

I have a good friend who has (several times) thought or dreamed of me at the exact moments when I was feeling depressed or having some other important thing happen to me. I’ve also had a vision of one of my friends dying a few days before it happened. Stuff like that tends to make you give pretty good consideration to the possibility of the supernatural.

When I was newly married in Florida, my wife and I rented a cottage that had been used previously as a residence for a family escaping the winter cold in Michigan. They had stopped coming down when the father died, so we moved in. One night, my wife had gone to bed and I was watching TV in the living room when a man walked through the outside wall, looked around for maybe 30 seconds and exited through the kitchen wall. I wasn’t scared; it was more of a WTF was that? He never showed up again. He was of average height and weight, clean shaven, casually dressed, an older man, maybe in his late sixties.When I told the landlady about it and described him, she thought it might have been the father who’d rented the place for many years and he was checking the place out one last time. She said she had pictures of him at her house, but she never got around to showing them to me.

I lived in bush Alaska once. I was 16 and a happy kid with zero history of mental illness. We moved to this island and I took the garage. (Uninsulated with no beating. I did not think ahead to the winter.) Anyways, I went from normal to insanely depressed in weeks. I was very religious at the time, a little moreso then now, probably, but I renounced belief in G-d and everything out of nowhere.

This could all be chalked up to sudden teenage angst, and the fact that my siblings felt immediately uncomfortable upon entering my room and would leave could be chalked up to me being a dick, but waking up in the middle of the night to some weird voice trying to talk to me was bizarre. Especially since on one instance the next morning my dad told me the same thing had happened to him that same night. I asked him the time he’d woken up, and it was the exact same minute. That was odd.

Even worse was when both my parents, on different night, were up latest of everyone and clearly saw a really tall shadow person walk through the walls and into the garage. My mom froze, but told my dad so when he saw it he was ready and chased it so it ran away. Freaky.

Later, I learned the previous tenants had warned my parents intently about this house even going so far as to carve a warning into the doorway. (I never saw this.)

Also, and I did see this before I moved, there was some super mega giant pentagram like thing carved into the wood directly beneath where I slept. It had been hidden by this rug and I think the landlord finally admitted that yes, a few tenants ago had been these sorcerer people that did weird rituals in that garage.

Not to mention that town has a very high rate of reported supernatural occurrences and some of the highest shamanism in the country.

I’m a pretty scientifically minded person, and a natural skeptic, at least now, so I still don’t know what to think of that whole period of time.

Supernatural experiences? Wow, yeah. Kind of the wrong time of year for this, but it’s your dime, uh, quarter.

When we moved into a big, older house the year I was four, the place was already more than thirty years old. It was built in 1930, early in the era of the Great Depression. The builder, Charlie, was also the first resident, and he, his wife and their two sons lived there for several years. One winter night sometime in the mid-1950s, Charlie went out to get the mail, and was struck and killed by the car of a passing University student. When their sons moved out a few years later, Charlie’s wife had the house converted to up-and-down apartments. My folks bought the house in 1961, and used it as a single family by unlocking the separator doors.

Mom was the first person to see Charlie. She was sensitive anyway, being a quarter Cherokee and the granddaughter of a Medicine Woman. She usually saw a slender man in a wide-brimmed, brown hat out of the corner of her eye; usually while she worked in the kitchen. Neighbors who knew him confirmed Charlie’s appearance. Years later, in a letter from her family home in New Hampshire, Charlie’s widow asked if Mom had ever experienced anything weird in the house. Again, she confirmed Mom’s experience.

We would frequently hear someone walking around in the upstairs ‘kitchen’, when we knew the second floor was vacant. Mom kept a few plants up there, some with long stems and big leaves. I felt a presence one evening, and said, “Charlie, it that’s you, move the leaf on this plant.” The leaf twitched, exactly as if some playful old man had tweaked it. After I moved out, Mom told us she had received another letter from one of Charlie’s sons, and that his mother had passed away. Mom never saw Charlie again, and we never heard footsteps in the upstairs kitchen until my Dad passed away. Charlie was just biding time, waiting for his wife.

After Dad died ten years ago, Mom said she often heard him walking around, regardless of where she was. She even said she talked to him a few times, in their bedroom off the upstairs kitchen. I know that I frequently heard footsteps in the upstairs again when I went to visit. A couple years later, we moved Mom to a retirement condominium not too far away. She said she still talked to our Dad and even her own Dad, but we knew her mind was going, too; she was well over eighty.

Dad had been a fairly heavy pipe and cigar smoker. Once in a while after he passed away, I would smell cigar smoke when there was no one else around. Later, I would find that Mom had had some sort of minor emergency; my Sister, and RN, had taken her to the ER or some such. One afternoon, driving home on a lonely highway without another soul in sight, my car filled up with cigar smoke, and the same brand Dad used to buy. I pulled over and called my sister right away.

“Is Mom okay?”

“Huh? She’s fine. I’m over here right now. Why do you ask?”

“I just smelled Dad’s cigar, real strong.”

“Oh.” (Laughs) “Well, what’s the one thing Dad loved almost as much as his family?”

Easy one. “Um, his pets?”

“Yeah. When I got here a few minutes ago, Mitzi had gotten outside.” Mom’s Calico was declawed; an inside cat.

Mom passed away a little over two years ago. I have smelled Dad’s cigar only once since then, shortly after Mom’s Memorial Service. I think that, like Charlie, he was just waiting for Mom.

I have had a lot more experiences. Sorry for the Wall-O-Text, but you asked for it!

Supernatural? Well, dealt with a pump room (the room where fuel is delivered to the rest of the ship) that was unnaturally cold and always felt like someone was watching me any time I entered it. Had a bad encounter there I really don’t want to go into. Without going into detail it was on a ship from Vietnam era and bad things happened on it. Never actually saw a ghost but had enough unexplained phenomenon happen to convince me the ship was haunted.

sure it’s about the original AC the best Survival Horror Game their never was but still.

as for personal experiences with the supernatural, i was walking home one very dark night with the only light being those from street lamps when i happened to look down at my shadow which was perfectly normal stretching out away from the source if the light as shadows do, but behind my shadow was the shadow of a large dog. i looked around as their were feral dogs in the area which had been known to attack people but of course there was no dog or even any dog shaped objects which could be casting the shadow. i started walking it followed me, I stopped it stopped i started walking again it started walking again. the dog’s shadow followed me all the way home.
throughout the whole experience i probably should have been afraid but i wasn’t rather than being something I should fear i instead felt protected as though it was guarding me and keeping me safe.

First, I live in Cincinnati, OH and there’s this local legend called the Oxford Light (there’s info online if anyone is curious). It’s a ball of light that floats down the road. I’ve seen it and closely enough that I know it wasn’t a car or a person with a flashlight. I feel like there must be some sort of explanation, but I have no idea what.

The second is that one time my dryer made me a new sock. I had a pair of thrift store socks I loved, except that one of them had worn out elastic and wouldn’t stay up. Being thrift store socks, I’ve never seen another matching pair. While doing my laundry one day, I found another matching sock. Just one. As if to replace my broken sock. I looked everywhere for a fourth, asked my family about it, but I never got any explanation. This one really freaked me out actually because I had physical evidence that something crazy had happened. I pestered my mom about it (since she was the only other person doing laundry) until finally she just told me “Well, dryers always eat socks. It was bound to give one back eventually.” And then my mind snapped and now I try not to think about it.

When my little sister was born we were living in my grandma’s house. My grandpa had died a few years earlier. He had come into the living room from working on the ranch & just keeled over & passed away. Anyways, when my sister was finally brought home from the hospital, there were times when she would look over to some part of the room no one was in & she would smile, make happy noises & move her arms around like she would if someone was there. The thing is, my grandma & grandpa’s dog would get up & look in the same direction & start wagging his tail.

The next few happened to my brother at different times. This is were the creepy happens.

Years ago my brother & his friends got together & rented a house to live in. This house was built in the 19teens so we got the old house thing covered. In the basement there were some old metal 55 gallon drums. These things took 2 people to move or one person with effort. One day they were in the living room were the door down to the basement was & heard one being moved. They looked at each other & then went down to see what was going on. There wasn’t another way into the basement, but maybe someone had broke into the house earlier. They went down to investigate but couldn’t find anything or anybody. They tried moving one of the drums & it sounded like the noise they heard. They were a bit creeped out.

Same house, later incident. My brother was listening to some various CDs in his room. He put in one CD that he had just bought & suddenly felt this overwhelming sense of anger & hatred directed at him. He opened his eyes & saw nothing, but he felt as if someone were standing over him & glowering at him. While he was looking around he reached over & flipped off the CD to hear better & suddenly the feeling went away. He decided not to listen to that CD in that house again. No, I don’t what band that was.

Another time, my brother was staying at his onetime fiance’s farm that had been in the family over 100 years. He was mowing the yard at the “Old House”. That was the old family house & were their grandma had lived until she died. Everyone else lived in the “New House”, only using the Old House for special occasions like holiday get togethers or just for time alone & keeping it locked up. They would joke about grandma still being there because they said that at times they could hear the exact same sound of her walking across a room in her hard heeled shoes. Anyways back to my brother. He had left everyone down the road at the New House & was out mowing the yard at the Old House when he got this feeling like he was being watched. He looked up at the Old House just in time to see a curtain drop as if someone had been standing there at the window holding up the curtains to look out at him. He said that was the fastest he had ever finished mowing in his life.